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I think Chinese miners like the AMD vega cards because they get cheap power and power consumption is not huge issue. If you like anywhere where power cost is high, the performance per watt is really important.

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Think of it as the Radeon RX 580 / 480 replacement. It will be small, and is likely to perform as well as the Vega 14nm that shipped last year. In the Nvidia performance world Navi should perform close to Geforce GTX 1080 which is quite good for the mainstream part but probably on part of the mainstream part planned after the high end part.

Fudzilla has already reported that Vega 7nm is not a Gaming GPU. This might cause some confusion as there are two different abbreviations floating around. GPU as in General Purpose Unit, or GPU as a graphics processing unit. What we meant by saying Vega 7nm is not a GPU, we want to make crystal clear that Vega 7nm will not be a gaming part.

Navi 7nm won’t have two different SKUs, one that miraculously goes after the Geforce Turing edition planned for later this year. So, the long story short, AMD won’t have anything in the high-end space faster than Vega between now and end of 2019. In GPU world this is eternity. This is the product where Radeon Technology Group really spent some time to go after this highly competitive and profitable mainstream / performance market. Of course, AMD did sell every single RX 580 / 570 cards as well as every single Vega 56 and 64 manufactured to miners, as these guys were buying anything to get their hands on it, but with the current situation on the market, one can only hope that there will be a mining demand in mid 2019.

Radeon RX 580 / 570 definitely needs an update as this Polaris based architecture was simply a slight improvement over the Radeon RX 480 generation based on GCN 4 and Polaris core. The new Navi 7nm mainstream chip would bring much needed advanced to stay competitive and add some Ray Tracing acceleration elements in the chip too.

The earliest we would expect a Navi successor, a real high end chip, would be at some point in 2020. This is great news for Jeff Fishers team, the head of all Geforce gaming stuff at Nvidia but a sad day for the competition.

Our biggest fear is that Jensen will push the prices of already ridiculous overpriced high-end GPU even further. The David Wang / Mike Rayfield combo is definitely working hard to make adjustments to the roadmaps, but these things take years.

Let’s hope it will not be too late. - Fudzilla

I'm not too sure how much credence I give this. Navi is rumoured to be AMD's MCM approach to GPU's... so.. it'd be hard to say where it could end up

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According to AMD, the miniaturized process brings a 35% performance boost over last-generation 14nm nodes. At the same time power efficiency has been doubled, so the chip can theoretically do the same amount of work with half the wattage.

Ultimately, all the work being done on 7nm Radeon Instinct graphics will trickle down to improve the forthcoming generation of 7nm Radeon Vega GPUs.

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No, Sony didn't counter Microsoft with a brief announcement of the PlayStation 5 at its annual E3 event, but some fascinating details have emerged about the PS5, its graphics solution and just how involved in the process AMD was this time around. This isn't just a story for eager console gamers, either. It's part of a larger narrative about AMD's identity and its semi-custom chip business.

Speaking to industry sources this week under conditions of anonymity, I've learned that the PS5 will use both AMD's Zen+ core and Navi graphics architectures. What isn't clear is whether the PS5 will incorporate a beefy SoC (system on a chip) or use separate Ryzen and Navi-based components.

Right now little is known about AMD's Navi graphics architecture, other than the fact it will use the 7nm process. That detail, however, is important. As it has done numerous times with its semi-custom clients, AMD has a solid history of developing integrated and discrete GPUs with low power envelopes perfect for a console.

Which brings us to, in my eyes, the more interesting revelation. According to my sources, Navi isn't just inside the Sony PS5; it was created for Sony. The vast majority of AMD and Sony's Navi collaboration took place while Raja Koduri -- Radeon Technologies Group boss and chief architect -- was at AMD.

Koduri joined up with Intel late last year as chief architect for its new Core and Visual Computing Group.

But the collaboration came at the expense of Radeon RX Vega and other in-development projects. Allegedly, Koduri saw up to a massive 2/3 of his engineering team devoted exclusively to Navi against his wishes, which resulted in a final RX Vega product Koduri was displeased with as resources and engineering hours were much lower than anticipated. As I mention in my companion report, the implication is that AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su wanted to devote more energy into its semi-custom business than its desktop graphics division.

Taken as a solitary piece of news, this may sound borderline ridiculous. But when zooming out to a wider angle -- as I did today analyzing AMD's history of consumer graphics products and its semi-custom business -- it fits like a glove. The same sources who spoke to me about the PS5 had more to say about AMD's relationships with Apple, Microsoft and Sony.

Beyond that, RX Vega has failed to find traction in the market. AMD launched its "Frontier Edition" of Vega that was a confusing (if sexy) hybrid between professional graphics and gaming. This was done before its dedicated RX gaming version to satisfy a promise that Vega would reach consumers within the deadline AMD promised.

Pull on that thread and it sheds more light on Vega's troubled development, due to the majority of Koduri's engineering team being swiped away not just to work on Navi, but to work on Navi for Sony.

On a related note, a new rumor emerged recently about Navi for desktop being merely a midrange part and not competing with Nvidia's high-end GeForce cards. That makes perfect sense if it was developed primarily for a console first.

The other interesting aspect to all of this is that my sources never mentioned Microsoft in the Navi conversations. This is pure speculation, but maybe Microsoft's next Xbox devices -- code-named "Scarlett" -- won't use Navi at all. Perhaps it will use a separate semi-custom solution incorporating Vega, or something else entirely that we're not privy to. Either way, the conversations I had referred to Navi in the past tense, as if it was already finished.

Perhaps Sony is closer to a PS5 than Microsoft is to a next-generation Xbox?

I've reached out to AMD and Sony for any further comments or clarification.